Ripe on the vine: Passion for wine matures from hobby into success story

Dr. Michael Dragutsky remains in the thick of the business as a co-founder and owner of Cornerstone Cellars and its now three labels. “We had no idea this would happen when we started,” Dragutsky says of his growing concern, which produces about 13,000 cases of wine a year.

A 1991 Cornerstone Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, one of the first wines produced by Cornerstone.

In the fall of 1991, David Sloas and Mike Dragutsky bought 10 tons of surplus grapes from legendary Napa Valley winemaker Randy Dunn.

The two friends, gastroenterologists in Memphis who had no experience making wine but loved to collect and drink it, found a facility to rent, hired a winemaker, bought French oak barrels to age the wine, and produced 465 cases of a cabernet sauvignon that the Wine Spectator magazine ranked in a tie for seventh among 450 cabernets from 1991.

Thus was Cornerstone Cellars born, and from that small but highly regarded beginning two decades ago, the brand has grown to include three labels — Cornerstone, Stepping Stone and Rocks — and an outpost in Oregon's Willamette Valley that makes pinot noir and chardonnay wines, producing altogether about 13,000 cases annually, with a goal of perhaps 15,000 cases.

"We had no idea this would happen when we started," said Dragutsky, sounding pleased and somewhat baffled at the same time. "It's wonderful on several levels, mainly all the people I've met, the fact that I'm really involved in the wine business — it's phenomenal."

And he is involved. While Sloas has taken a position as an equity partner in Cornerstone, Dragutsky is in the thick of it.

"I try to put 10-plus hours a week into Cornerstone. I talk to Craig (Camp, Cornerstone's director of winemaking and managing partner) every other day. I pay the bills. Even when they do the blends, they talk to me, but I leave those decisions to them," he said, referring to Camp and Cornerstone winemaker Jeff Keene.

Dragutsky credits Camp with many of the ideas and much of the energy behind Cornerstone's expansion.

"Craig is responsible for the majority of our success," Dragutsky said. "He knows how to make wine. He has a great sense of the palate of the consumer. And he has a great vision."

Camp worked in wine importing and wholesale in Chicago before going in 2000 to Italy, where he studied winemaking in important properties in Piedmont.

Returning to the United States in 2004, Camp became president of Anne Amie Vineyards in Oregon, and then, in 2009, he joined Cornerstone.

"I wanted to make cabernet (sauvignon)," Camp said in a telephone interview from California, "and Napa Valley, well, it's Napa Valley, and that's where I wanted to be."

Cornerstone produces two cabernet sauvignon wines: a Napa Valley bottling and one from the more limited Howell Mountain region within Napa Valley. Howell Mountain was the source of the original lot of grapes from Dunn. There's also a very limited reserve-style cabernet.

"So," said Camp, "there were the two cabernets, but the idea was to expand from that basis and move into a more viable business model, but expand into areas we had a passion for."

He described the three labels as "really different projects, with the Cornerstone cabernets as the pinnacle. The implication with Cornerstone is that they're age-worthy wines.

The Stepping Stone idea was to make a more approachable wine from cooler sites in Napa, giving us the ability to produce wines from different grapes, like the riesling and sauvignon blanc." There's even a Stepping Stone Rosé, made from syrah grapes.

The new Rocks label represents the least expensive and most flexible of the lineup.

"Rocks can be a totally free and open exploration of grapes each year," Camp said, "and at a different price point. They're like house wines for everyday drinking."

Though Camp left Oregon for Napa Valley almost four years ago, he still has a soft spot for wines made from the pinot noir grape, and when his friend Tony Rynder left the winemaking position at award-winning Domaine Serene, he thought, "This is the moment."

Now Camp and Rynder produce a Cornerstone Pinot Noir and chardonnay and a Stepping Stone Pinot Noir from Oregon's Willamette Valley, bringing the overall roster of wines to about 14.

Local financial adviser Hal Lewis became an investor in Cornerstone about six years ago, though he was a consultant for Sloas and Dragutsky from the beginning of the project. He described the expansion of the Cornerstone vision and its roster of products as an "absolute necessity. It had reached the point of being the dreaded medium-size business, too big to be a hobby, too small to fund itself."

The remedy was to put more money into the company and redefine the business model. For one thing, Lewis said, "We discovered when we opened a tasting room in Yountville (in Napa Valley) that people wanted a white wine, and we didn't have one." Both Camp and Keene, who has transformed the Cornerstone cabernets to a more elegant and restrained style, were eager to expand the portfolio, even though these decisions were made during the worst of the economic downturn of 2008 and 2009.

"It was a tremendous risk," said Lewis, "but it also gave us the chance to buy a lot of great juice from wineries that were going down and put it into the Stepping Stone wines without compromising the quality.

"That was always the goal throughout the project: Never compromise quality."

Lewis described Dragutsky as "brilliant. His dedication to Cornerstone is amazing."

That dedication recently took Dragutsky to China.

"The next step is global projects," he said. "We ship wine to China, but we have to develop relationships and take it to the next level."

Wine List

Cornerstone Cellars produces wines under three labels at different prices. Here's the run-down, with suggested retail prices at the winery. Many of the wines are available in local retail shops and restaurants.